Pressures from inside and outside the organization will continue to drive companies toward a global manufacturing solution.

Executives are demanding it, in order to achieve global management of process and sites, uniform standards across the enterprise for tracking, measuring and viewing performance, and the ability to record, report and view production data across the enterprise. As AMR Research states, until the gap between ERP and the plant floor is closed, "ERP will continue to guide the business with a set of erroneous assumptions that aren't based on the realities of production outcomes.

For IT, there is no alternative either, as the cost of supporting and maintaining disparate systems makes it increasingly difficult--impossible in many cases--to keep pace with the global supply chain.

And driving it all, of course, is the insatiable appetite of the world market for more and better goods, delivered less expensively.

By providing a next-generation, global approach to MES, Apriso enables companies to expand the scope of their ERP systems, gain true visibility into plant operations, develop and deploy best practices to all manufacturing plants, and gain the control they need to compete in a global marketplace.